The transcript reads like many huge pieces of modern art in high-end museums. You keep examining it, looking for meaning and message. People keep saying that the artist is a genius. But the more you look, the more opaque and obscure it becomes. And you can’t shake the feeling that, actually, the whole thing is rubbish.
He uses the phrase “I don’t recall” 194 times. In various other formulations, the invocation of his amnesia is closer to 300 over a seven-hour deposition. He continually falls back on just how busy he is managing $6.2 billion in spending plus 6,000 employees. That’s why he simply can’t pay attention to the crucial issue being adjudicated: whether he directed agencies under his influence to censor science and other COVID-19-related matters at social media companies.
To hear him tell it, he knows next to nothing about social media, never really pays attention to Reddit, has barely a passing familiarity with Twitter and Facebook, doesn’t recall any real connection with Google, and condescends repeatedly to the attorneys with dismissive remarks about his own importance compared with their own petty concerns.
“Well, as I’ve said multiple times,” he said, “I don’t pay attention to what social media organizations like Google and YouTube and Twitter, and all that, what they do because I’m not involved in that.”
Yes, his daughter worked at Twitter, but he’s not sure of the dates. Did she work there in August 2021?
“I don’t recall. She may have already left then.”
Even when confronted with emails he wrote, and references to phone calls he made, his defense is that he reads and sends thousands of emails and cannot be held to any of them. Even on matters related to the Great Barrington Declaration, he pleads that he had no time for such matters.
“I’m not 100 percent sure that the meeting of the epidemiologists, authors of the declaration with the Secretary, this was very likely the first time it was brought to my attention, although I can’t say for sure. I would imagine—again, getting back to context, this is not something that I would have been paying a lot of attention to. I was knee-deep in trying to do things like develop a vaccine that wound up saving the lives of millions of people. That’s what I was doing at the time. So an email like this may not have necessarily risen to the top of my awareness and interest.”
This is fascinating because, in other interviews and testimony, he equally claims that vaccine development isn’t his area and focus. He’s for them, but never approved them. That’s for others to do. Same with particular grants such as the many to EcoHealth Alliance, which flipped the money over to the Wuhan virus lab that was deploying what any layperson would call gain-of-function research.
To give you a flavor, here’s what he says about EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak, with whom Fauci has a long and well-known relationship, documented extensively by everyone who knows anything about this subject. Here, Fauci’s chutzpah is boundless:
“Q. Above that, it lists a man called Peter Daszak. How do you say his name, if you know?
“A. I’m not sure. I think it’s Daszak. I think so.
“Q. Do you know Mr. Daszak?
“A. I have met him once or twice. I would not exactly characterize him as an acquaintance.
“Q. In what connection have you met him?
“A. You know, I don’t even remember meeting him, but I do know that someone showed me a picture at a meeting where somebody said, here, take a picture with him. And so I clearly must have met him because there’s a photograph, I believe, of he and I. But that is not unusual, when you go to a scientific meeting, you run into hundreds of people. And I believe that this Dr. Daszak is one of the people that I almost—well, I did run into him because I believe I’ve seen a photograph of he and I together at a meeting. But he’s not somebody that I would have had a major amount—I think someone in one of the thousands of e-mails of mine that have been FOIA’d, someone showed me, I think, or pointed out, that there was an e-mail from Peter Daszak to me. And I don’t remember the content, but I think it was some casual type of response to something, but it’s not someone that I deal with on a regular basis. That is rather clear.”
There’s a reason why “gaslighting” is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. What Fauci is doing here embodies it better than anything else, comparable only to Sam Bankman-Fried’s own interviews.
One gets rather bleary-eyed at reading 446 pages of this stuff, and there’s a real danger here that unless you are critically minded, you can actually work too hard to try to make sense of all this gibberish. It’s like having a guest for dinner who insists you’re serving fish when you know for sure that you’re serving chicken. Even after showing the package, he still insists.
So, yes, it all gets pretty bizarre. Or to return to the Museum of Modern Art, all the tour guides are telling you that this is a work of genius, but you can’t shake the sense that it looks like the fruit of art class in a large preschool.
I was trying to think of a character from fiction who compares, and the person who keeps coming to mind is Gustavo Fring from “Breaking Bad” (played by Giancarlo Esposito). He’s the Chilean-born proprietor of Los Pollos Hermanos, a pillar of the community with excellent relations with the Drug Enforcement Administration, local police, and local government. Everyone adores him. He serves on every board and is adored by media. He is confident enough in his duplicity that he faces down every interrogation.
About what is he duplicitous? Well, he’s the lord of a major and lucrative drug empire. His chain of chicken restaurants is nothing but a money-laundering operation. He’s successful at doing it because he’s ruthless about killing anyone who challenges his power. He has grown very comfortable in living these two lives. He imagines that he’s smarter than everyone else and so can get away with this forever. And in truth, he is and does, until he’s finally outwitted, not by the authorities but by an even more ambitious would-be drug lord.
We also know from Fauci’s own schedule what his real job for three years has been: he was a media star, morning until night, daily, and only for friendly outlets. He shilled for lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masking and vaccines, and trashed anyone and everyone who questioned whether this was really the right way to go about handling infectious disease. Of course, when confronted about all this, he demurs and says he was merely making recommendations.
Very subtly and carefully, however, what’s really happening with Fauci’s bout of amnesia is this: He’s preparing a scenario in which he throws everyone else under the bus. All his associates are now aware of this. He’s saving his skin and is glad to sacrifice everyone else. I was among many thousands who read this transcript with awareness of precisely what he’s up to. One can almost hear the screams of fury among the thousands who’ve dealt with him over the years.
One of the reasons we like “Breaking Bad” is because it allows us to observe duplicity and dissembling on a scale that we rarely encounter in the regular course of our lives. And yet we know it does in fact exist. In this way, the best method to read the Fauci deposition is as a missing episode in “Breaking Bad,” in which another drug kingpin is in the process of being caught pretending to be one thing and actually being another, while outing everyone else as the bad guy.
Which is not to say that insincerity always governs their lives. The drug kingpin Gustavo Fring strongly believed that he was right in being so powerful and successful, and would do anything to stay that way. Anthony Fauci does too.
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